


doesn't feel right

by animad



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: 2011, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-31
Updated: 2019-03-31
Packaged: 2019-12-29 21:44:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18302498
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/animad/pseuds/animad
Summary: Phil goes and visits his parents on the isle of man, leaving Dan home alone in the Manchester apartment for the first time.





	doesn't feel right

**Author's Note:**

> phandomficfests shuffle mode prompt: Lost (season one) by camp cope
> 
> (not fact checked.)

Dan sits halfway up the stairs, watching Phil drag his suitcase to the front door. He digs his hand into his packet of crisps and drops a handful of crumbs in his mouth. Phil sits on the bottom step tying the laces on his trainers with bunny ears then puts on his coat. 

“Remembered some pants this time?” Dan asks from his perch, picking at the final crumbs stuck in the corners of the packet.

Phil pauses, lays down his suitcase and digs around several layers of jumpers and jeans and tshirts. He always packs as if for a month expedition to the arctic and a week long vacation to the sun soaked beaches of Spain simultaneously.

“This is the UK, Dan, you never know what’s going to happen.” Phil had told him this morning, as he’d thrown half his wardrobe on top of Dan’s duvet clad legs.

“Isle of Man’s not part the UK,” Dan mumbles, eyes closed, blanket pulled up to his chin, flinching as something soft suddenly hits his face.

“You know what I mean,” Phil said, pushing their combined sock drawer closed with a thud. Combined, because they’ve already given up trying to seperate them after a dozen “is this yours?” There’s still a small section reserved for the definitely-Dan’s black sock collection for day’s where he feels completely committed to The Void(™) look. “Go make breakfast.”

Dan groans into his pillow. “Why should I get up early just because you booked yourself a morning flight.” This time something much heavier landed on him and buried it’s face in his neck.

“Because,” Phil said, kissing Dan’s jaw. “I won’t see you for a whole 5 days-” another kiss, “and I’ll miss you so I want to at least have breakfast with you before I leave.”

Dan turned his head to kiss Phil properly. “Do you have time for pancakes?” 

“I always have time for pancakes, Dan.”

Turns out he didn’t really have time for pancakes so now he’s rushing when it came time to leave, and has to run through the apartment to grab some underwear to cram into the corners of his suitcase.

Finally he climbs the stairs to sit beside Dan, who already has his arms open making grabby hands, crisp packet crumpled up on the step beside him. Phil squeezes around Dan’s shoulders and Dan squeezes back.

“Don’t watch too many sad movies okay?” Phil says. Dan nods against his shoulder.

“Say hi to your parents for me. And text me when you get there.”

“You could have come with me you know.” Phil says quietly, pulling back slightly to stroke through Dan’s hair and down his cheek.

“I know,” Dan replies, turning into the warmth of Phil’s palm. At the same time Phil’s phone dings in his pocket.

Phil texts him once he’s in the taxi waiting downstairs, and once he’s seated on the plane, then again in the air and also in the taxi on the way to his parents’ house. Then once (many times) more not 30 seconds after he’s stepped through the door, after he’s hugged his mum but before he’s accepted his first mug of coffee already on the boil. 

\--

After Phil had left, Dan had remained on his step for a full 5 minutes more. Licking at the last molecules of flavour from the inside of the now torn apart crisp packet, because he’s nothing if not a completionist but mostly trying to stave off the inevitability of the next 5 days.

It’s the first time Phil’s gone away since they moved in together officially, therefore the first time officially leaving Dan by himself. Which is fine, Dan’s a big boy, it’s not the first time he’s been left home alone in his life. And 5 days is really not that long, he’ll be okay. 

He stands up and looks at the clock on his phone; a few minutes past 9. His first instinct is to go back to bed, this is the earliest he’s been up since dropping out of uni after all so it would be so easy to go back to bed. Bed would be really fucking nice. But the apartment is so deathly quiet that he also has an urge just make some noise, and there’s several days worth of pots and pans and plates overflowing the sink that he suddenly feel like need to be cleaned. 

So he opens Spotify on his phone and sets about doing the washing up. When that’s finished he decides the worktops need cleaning as well, and the table. So he does those too. At some point, Phil texts him with an artsy picture of the plane’s propeller in the clouds and Dan dries his soapy hands to reply with a picture of the sparkling kitchen.

Dan’s new found productivity extends to him putting on the laundry and hoovering the entire apartment. By the time he’s done he has several missed texts from Phil, so he puts some noodles into a pot of boiling water and replies.

\--

Dan wakes up with Phil’s pillow clutched to his chest. They’d texted most of the previous day, and had laughed for several hours over video chat after they’d both gone to bed.

Now he lays with his entire body curled around Phil’s pillow and when he checks his phone he finds a morning text from Phil time stamped a couple hours ago. Apparently Phil’s parents had made them get up for an early morning walk. Dan sends his condolences before dropping his phone onto the bed in front of him and the pillow. He closes his eyes for a few seconds while he waits for a reply then wakes up a few hours later to a string of texts from Phil conveying his misery in stronger and stronger terms. Dan feels a little pang of guilt every one where Phil admits how he’d much rather be at home with Dan. 

Home, with Dan, is Dan. 

They’ve been together 2 years now, and it’s not like they haven’t called this apartment home already, many times in fact. Dan even caught himself calling the apartment Phil had lived in by himself home before. It had felt like a home for Dan. They’ve both already admitted that home is wherever the other is, where they can hide together from the rest of the world. Where they can curl up together on the sofa until some ungodly hour in the morning, where they can love each other without judgement, and can laugh and cry and feel all of their emotions no matter how deep and complex and confusing together. 

Sometimes it’s scary how settled Dan feels with Phil, how forever it feels. He’s known so many of his friends to break up after 2 years together, sometimes after even longer, and for Dan on the outside looking in it had felt like so little time between helping them together at the start and being the shoulder to cry on at the end. 

This isn’t even his own longest ever relationship, but that had felt nothing like this. He’s only a few years older than he was then, but he feel so much more mature now and everything feels so much more real. He’s got his name on the contract for an entire apartment in a city he wouldn’t have given a second thought to back then, shared with his best friend and most favourite person in the entire world. 

He sends a bunch of sad faces back to Phil with a bunch of hearts, before squeezing the pillow again. He shouldn’t be missing Phil this much; it’s barely been 24 hours. He forces himself to sit up and shower. Then to eat and do something. 

The ‘something’ mostly consists of video games and pizza it turns out.

\--

The next day Dan goes to the shops because Phil had made him promise to get some fresh air. Dan had suggested he just open a window but Kath had come up to the webcam at that moment and told him to ‘get some fresh air, young man, it isn’t good to spend all your time cooped up inside’. Neither of them mentioned that that’s what they usually did when they were together anyway.

So Dan goes for a walk. He’s not entirely sure where he’s going yet or if he’s going anywhere at all but he has music in his ears and a warm breeze against his face and it’s not so bad. 

He ends up at their sofa by the window in Starbucks, his foot up against the low coffee table, hot drink in hand and an empty space next to him. People pass by him on the street; teenagers laughing with their friends, families, couples. An elderly couple arm in arm, shuffling by so slowly, looking as if the only thing keeping them up right is each other. 

There’s suddenly an itch under his skin and he just can’t sit still any longer. 

The rest of his day is spent trying to write a script for his next video, or folding the laundry he’d left in the washing machine the day before, and various other things that get left half finished. He even gets bored of Mario Cart after half an hour. 

There’s barely 200 words down on otherwise empty the word document, some anecdote he’s not even sure he’ll end up filming, because that itch is still there, making him get up every 5 minutes and changes position in his chair half a dozen times and opens the cupboards in the kitchen twice as many more, dissatisfied with his choices but eating it anyway. 

He ends up with his head an inch off the floor and his legs up the back of the sofa holding his laptop against his chest when his phone buzzes in his pocket. He falls to the floor in an attempt to grab it and when he answers Phil he sounds winded. 

“Hey!” 

“Hey, are you okay? You sound like you’ve been running.”

“Running?” Dan snorts, “fuck off, are you okay I thought you weren’t gonna call till later?” 

“Yeah, everything’s fine.” He pauses, then more quietly says, “I just missed you is all.” 

“Oh, okay.” Dan ducks his head so his fringe falls in front of his eyes and grins. He shuffles so his back is against the sofa, and pulls up his knees.

“My family’s downstairs watching TV and I got bored so I thought I’d call you instead. Is that okay? Were you busy I can call back later if you want?” Phil sounds like he’s about it hang up so Dan practically shouts down the phone when he says:

“No! No, sorry, I wasn’t busy.” He brings his hand up to his mouth and slots a fingernail in between his teeth. “Actually the opposite. I’ve tried to do a bunch of stuff today but nothing feels right without you here. I feel a bit lost to be honest.” He huffs a laugh, “but I’m just being stupid.”

“No, you’re not.” Phil says immediately. “You’re not stupid. I feel the same way. We went for a walk up the beach earlier but all I could think about was how it would be a billion times better if you were there.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

When they hang up, the itch under Dan’s skin is gone. Phil had told him every little detail about his day and Dan had just sat and listened. Dan had told Phil he’d got some fresh air, and hadn’t had to open a window to do it. Phil said Kath would be proud, and that he was too. 

\--

Dan wakes up the next morning and decides he’s going to make the most of being home alone. He stays in bed until the middle of the afternoon and eats all the food in the house that Phil doesn’t like and plays Kanye on full volume. After dinner he has a bath, with bath bombs and candles and a face mask, and afterwards walks through the apartment naked (not that he can’t, and doesn’t, do that with Phil here anyway) until he realises it’s going to get dark soon and they have floor to windows with views across the entire city. 

He also does the thing Phil had told him not to do and picks out all the movies from their collection that Dan had been inadvertently saving for such as occasion. It’s not unusual for them to end their days curled up either on the sofa or in bed with a movie on, but Phil refuses to watch the ones he knows will make one or both of them cry. So that’s exactly what Dan does now. Half of them aren’t even that sad, but Dan’s a sucker for cheesy American rom coms with an emotional climax, bonus points for a profession of love in the snow.

Dan falls asleep halfway through the third, half a box of tissues clutched in his hand, and a teary, snot stained blanket pulled up to his chin. 

\--

The next morning he wakes up to a warm face, the sun streaming through the window almost blinding him when he opens his eyes. When he sits up the final tissue falls from his fingertips to join the collection on the floor and the DVD menu is still displayed on the TV. He pats around himself for the remote then squints at the screen to turn it off.

Collapsing face first on his bed, he doesn’t even bother getting under the covers, just pulls his blanket he’d dragged through the apartment behind up to his shoulders.

The next time he wakes up, there’s soft lips pressing against his forehead and a hand rubbing circles on his back. He turns around.

“Phil?” 

“Hey”

“What time s’it?” Dan rolls over fully to face Phil who’s knelt beside him on the bed.

“Nearly 12.”

Dan groans. “Wait i thought you weren’t coming back until later?”

“I know,” Phil says, stretching out properly to lay next to Dan. “But Martyn had an early flight so I decided to just leave with him.” He stretches his arm out so that Dan can rest his head on it. “And you missed our call last night.”

“Shit, sorry.” Dan says, “I was watching some movies, must have fallen asleep earlier than i thought.”

“So that’s what all the mess was in the living room.” Dan looks up at him sheepishly. “It’s okay,” Phil says, pressing another kiss to Dan’s forehead. “Still love you.” 

Dan pokes a finger into Phil’s side, who’s squark is broken off when Dan presses his mouth to his.

“Guess I love you too.” Phil pulls him closer and Dan shuffles down slightly to press his face into Phil’s shoulder. “Hey,” he says, muffled slightly by Phil’s hoodie. “I think there’s still some eggs left.” 

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading!
> 
> [rebloggle on tumble](http://yourfriendlyblogstalker.tumblr.com/post/183865601310/doesnt-feel-right)  
> 


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